Chat with Diane di Prima

Poet and Feminist

About Diane di Prima

In 1961, while pregnant and living in a Brooklyn walk-up, Diane di Prima typed *Revolutionary Letters* on a manual typewriter, each page carbon-copied, mimeographed, and passed hand-to-hand among radicals, poets, and abortion counselors before the word 'feminist' had entered mainstream lexicon. Her work fused tantric Buddhism with anarchist praxis, street-level motherhood with incantatory syntax, insisting that poetry wasn’t ornament but oxygen for uprising. She co-founded the New York Poets Theatre and the Floating Bear newsletter, not as institutions, but as porous, fugitive spaces where a line like 'the revolution will not be televised / it will be whispered in the dark / between women who know each other’s names' could circulate before it was quoted. Di Prima didn’t write *about* liberation; she composed its grammar, verbally embodied, bodily urgent, unapologetically erotic and enraged.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Diane di Prima:

  • “How did your pregnancy in 1961 shape the form and urgency of *Revolutionary Letters*?”
  • “What did 'poetry as direct action' mean when you mimeographed *The Floating Bear* in your kitchen?”
  • “You studied with Kenneth Rexroth, how did his anarchism differ from your own Buddhist-inflected radicalism?”
  • “In 'Rant,' you wrote 'I am a woman / I am a poet / I am a revolutionary.' Was that triad sequential, or simultaneous?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Diane di Prima face censorship for her work, and how did she respond?
Yes, her 1968 collection *Loba* was rejected by over 20 publishers for its explicit female-centered mysticism and sexual imagery. Rather than revise, she founded Eidolon Editions to print it herself, using offset presses in San Francisco. Later, the FBI monitored her mail for years under COINTELPRO, citing her ties to the Weather Underground and Black Panther Party. She responded by embedding coded resistance in poetic form, using Sanskrit mantras, astrological charts, and menstrual cycles as structural devices.
What role did Buddhism play in di Prima's political writing?
Buddhism grounded her activism in non-dual ethics: she saw no separation between chanting a mantra and organizing a rent strike. Her 1978 text *Recollections of My Life as a Woman* reframes enlightenment as embodied practice, breathing through labor pains, chanting while changing diapers, meditating amid police raids. She studied with Chögyam Trungpa not to transcend politics, but to deepen presence within struggle, insisting that 'awakening is not escape, but precise attention to the wound.'
How did di Prima's concept of 'the female line' differ from second-wave feminist literary theory?
She rejected linear genealogies (e.g. Woolf → Rich → Lorde) in favor of a rhizomatic 'female line', one that included Sappho, Hildegard von Bingen, and Yoko Ono alongside her peers, but also midwives, factory workers, and unnamed lovers whose oral poems circulated in kitchens and bus stops. In *Pieces of a Song*, she argued this line wasn’t inherited but *conjured*: 'We don’t descend, we ignite each other across time, like flint on steel.'
Why did di Prima emphasize astrology and Tarot in her pedagogy at Naropa University?
She taught them not as divination tools but as pre-modern systems of relational epistemology, ways to map power, timing, and consequence outside patriarchal logic. In her 'Poetics of the Body' seminars, students cast charts to locate their creative blocks not as personal failures, but as alignments with historical forces. She wrote: 'Saturn in the 7th house isn’t fate, it’s data about where the walls are built, so you know where to dig.'
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Topics

feminismpoetryactivism

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